Retired Navy SEAL Kristin Beck served 20 years in the military as Chris Beck. / GANNETT

by Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

by Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY

The Pentagon assures us it is moving with alacrity to develop gender-neutral standards for its most physically challenging jobs, including shouldering a rifle in the infantry.

The services are doing so to meet a 2016 deadline for all jobs, including those on front lines of combat, be open to women.

The Army's top personnel officer, Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg, put it plainly in a tweet this week: "Army's effort to ensure the best-qualified Soldiers, regardless of gender, are in the right positions, said LTG Bromberg."

The concept is about as American as it gets: a level playing field for all. If you're capable of doing the job, nothing should prevent you from doing it. In rapid succession, barriers to service have fallen for gays and lesbians and will shortly be eliminated for women.

That egalitarian spirit, however, does not extend to transgender troops. They're barred from service -- regardless of their fitness for service -- for health reasons. The Pentagon has no plans to change that prohibition.

USA TODAY's story on the issue of transgender troops this week drew some predictable comments. There were vituperative, mean-spirited blasts lobbed from behind the safety of a Facebook page.

More interesting, unpredictable and certainly more thoughtful, were comments made by transgender troops and veterans.

Not all of them were gung-ho about lifting the ban immediately and allowing transgender troops to serve.

Kristin Beck, the retired member of SEAL Team 6, talked about the emotional toll of hormone therapy and how it might require a year away from a service member's unit before they're ready to resume their duties. Beck called for a study about integrating transgender troops and a pilot program to see if it worked.

A transgender Army lieutenant colonel told me the transition was so fraught that job performance suffered.

"The military considers it a mental disease," the officer with a special forces background said. "And I'm not so sure they're wrong."

To be sure, there were plenty of transgender veterans and a currently serving soldier who said the barrier to their service was arbitrary and unnecessary.

The Army Reserve soldier enlisted as a woman and must still drill and serve as one or be discharged. In the office, during the week, though, the sergeant is a man. Putting up the facade of being a woman for the Army is a nuisance and degrading.

"Once we put on that uniform, everyone is the same," the sergeant said. "There shouldn't be any differences in gender or sexual orientation or color or creed."

There's a "phobia" about transgender people that needs to be overcome, the sergeant said. The fear of gays serving openly has proven to be overblown, the sergeant points out.

"Now that everybody says it's OK to be gay and in the service, it's not a problem. We don't have people walking around with boas in their uniforms. It's not like that. It won't be like that with the trans communities. We can be accepted and should be accepted."

Acceptance will require overcoming that "phobia." One advocate for transgender troops told me many people are uncomfortable with the issue, find it "icky," and simply wish that it would go away.

That seems to be the Pentagon's approach. They've made no effort to determine how many transgender troops are serving, nor even tally how many have been discharged. To be fair, some at this paper are uncomfortable with the topic.

Ignorance is not bliss. It won't go away. The sergeant is in an email chain of a few hundred female-to-male troops. An advocate reports similar numbers for male-to-female.

Granted, that's not a huge number in a military with 1.4 million active-duty troops and 800,000 reserves. It's not a front-burner issue for a Pentagon waging war in Afghanistan and wrestling with budget cuts.

But a hearing for these transgender troops seems in order. They volunteered to serve during a time of war, and the three cited in this week's report have served multiple combat deployments. Their service merits a hearing.